Victoria Persinger Ferguson
American Ginseng: Local Knowledge Global Roots
As an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation, Victoria Persinger Ferguson, of Roanoke, Virginia, has spent nearly three decades researching and developing programs around the Eastern Siouan of the central portion of what is now Virginia. In the 1920s Victoria’s grandparents moved the family away from the ancestral land in Virginia to the coalfields of southern West Virginia, where her grandfather, and then her father worked in the mines near Beckley. Learning from their father to hunt, trap, and forage for food and medicine in the surrounding woods, Victoria and her six siblings knew themselves to be Native American with a worldview sharply at odds with the extractive, profiteering worldview of European colonizers and industrialists. While they knew ginseng, and how to use it, they did not feel it was right to harvest it for sale. Victoria’s relationship to ginseng continues as an expression of the Monacan ethos first instilled in her by her father.
“The one thing that I wanted to point out about the ginseng from the perspective that I understand, the Native perspective, is that colonization turned ginseng into a commodity. It was not a commodity for us. It was a medicine but there are other medicines that you could use to do the same thing.” -- Victoria Ferguson
More often than not, representations of American ginseng place it in the company of men. As the profiles on this website suggest, there are also many women who have long been passionately involved with ginseng. But in the public story of ginseng, there is a strange silence on men and women of color who delve into, dig, or deal in ginseng. How does ginseng figure in the lives of Black, Indigenous People of Color? And how do indigenous ethics of “right relations” figure in the unfolding history of ginseng conservation? Reflecting on such questions, Vicky Ferguson, an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian nation who serves on the Monacan Historic Resource Committee, illuminates ginseng not only as one touchstone among many to Native medicinal practices, but also as a site at which radical differences between colonizing capitalist and Native American worldviews continue to play out.
Headquartered at Bear Mountain in Amherst County Virginia, the Monacan Nation (federally recognized in 2018) is one of the very few indigenous groups to remain on and around their ancestral lands. Victoria’s grandmother’s family continued to live in that region until the 1880s when they moved further up the James River onto the flood plain where their earlier ancestors had lived. Victoria’s grandmother married a descendent of Joseph Sparrowhawk and Sara Persinger who had raised five children in the Appalachian Mountains and also knew how to survive from the resources of the land. In 1840, when census takers refused to accept the Sparrowhawk surname, Joseph Sparrowhawk’s son and namesake, Vicky’s ancestor, took his mother’s surname and the family remained in and around Alleghany County in Virginia. The 1920s found Vicky’s grandparents living in Eagle Rock, an unincorporated hamlet of Botetourt County settled by descendants of Native Americans and freed slaves. The prospect of work in the coal mines led the family to Stanaford, WV, one of numerous camps in the segregated towns of the coalfields to which black, indigenous families of color were assigned.
Victoria’s father’s ability to survive in the woods offered the family a measure of independence from the company store. “He was really pretty good at using natural resources out of the forest to help provide additional foods and things like that for the family. I think that’s what made it possible for us to live in a coal camp and have a successful life in a coal camp as opposed to people who didn’t know how to live that way.” The youngest of seven siblings, Vicky learned from her father not only how to grow and procure food from garden and woods, but to cherish her Native American identity. “My father, I remember, growing up, would say to me, ‘When you go out in the street, people are not going to call you an Indian, but I need you to know that you’re an Indian.’”
Vicky’s father also instilled in her the ethos of living in right relationship with the earth, an ethos, Vicky explains, that accounts in part for the lack of BIPOC presence among ginseng diggers and dealers in the Appalachian region. “It’s not people of Native American ancestry, or even African-American ancestry who are in the middle of this whole ginseng thing. We’re just not part of it, by and large.”
There were practical reasons to seek alternatives to ginseng when looking for medicine. Vicky offered the example of treating colic: “You’ll see very often ginseng is listed as something used for colic. But ginseng is hard to find. The other cure for colic is calamus, which grows in the wetlands, and you could just go over to the wetlands and find your cure for colic. That would be a lot faster than just trying to find some ginseng some place.”
Framed within systems of medicine, right relations to plants and animals, and larger cycles of life, ginseng offered Victoria a means of instilling in her children attitudes of respect for and reciprocity with the earth. “I taught my kids: ‘You have to find three plants to take one. Because you always have to leave a Mommy and a Daddy behind.’ That was the way I explained to little people why you would never take them all.”
Finding access to places hospitable to such teaching poses a significant challenge.
“Today, as indigenous people, your ability to access land is directly linked to your loss of knowledge,” said Victoria. “Because you don’t have the ability to continue to teach those things. The land isn’t yours. You don’t have access to it.” Pointing out that this lack of access can be detrimental to species that need protection, she added, “You’re also not helping to monitor those items that are growing to make sure that they’re not over picked almost to extinction in an area.”
Access to habitats for ginseng and its companion medicinal plants goes hand in hand not only with teaching the young, and monitoring resources, but with propagation, traditionally a role ascribed in Monacan society to women. “I used to work with one of our tribal elders, named Miss Birdie, and she showed me ginseng. . .And she cautioned me. She said, ‘You know, we need to wait until the seeds come on and they’re ready to seed themselves’ before we would pull the roots of these plants. And we kept watching it and we went back, and eventually we left the plant, but we would take the seeds so that we could propagate this plant elsewhere. And it was a very important lesson because it taught me how important it was that women were propagating a lot of these plants in order to keep these plants growing or to move from place to place.”
Situated in Roanoke, VA, the Fergusons’ home is surrounded by and filled with touchstones to Native American history and values. “We’re on a little place called Round Hill,” Vicky explains, looking out over the Roanoke Valley. “The rivers and streams that ran through Roanoke hundreds of years ago would have been homeland to some of the native people who are associated with us as Monacans. The Tutelo or Tutero lived here, and their life would have been very much like the people who lived in Amherst County, which is where my ancestors come from on my grandmother’s side.” She grows Native American varieties of beans, corn, squashes, along with native wild plants such as staghorn stumac for a lemonade-flavored beverage rich in vitamin c, pokeberries and goldenrod for dying fibers, herbs for seasoning and teas, honeysuckle vines, gourds, bark, and clay dug from around Natural Bridge for baskets, containers, and fiber arts.
For conserving ginseng and other medicinal plants, Victoria suggests boosting public knowledge of and appreciation for the medicinal values of a wide variety of Appalachian forest understory species. “If we could encourage people to learn that there’s more medicines out there than ginseng that they could use, and maybe start using those medicines we would relax the amount of pressure we’re putting on the forest.” Even so, alternatives to ginseng, like calamus, are becoming harder to find because wetlands have been so overdeveloped. Conserving ginseng, it seems, is connected to the cultivation of right relations with everything, as Vicky observes: “The thing about it is, if we introduce people to these other alternatives, will the other alternatives become the new ginseng where things are pillaged and raped and plundered to almost non-existence?”
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